Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack, Amazon announced new managed database services and Elastic Beanstalk support targeting thousands upon thousands of Microsoft-centric developers.
Late on Tuesday, Amazon posted on its AWS blog that Microsoft SQL Server is now part of AWS’ relational database service (RDS) program. RDS already supported MySQL and Oracle databases.
Customers could already spin up Windows and SQL Server instances on Amazon EC2 but that required DBA expertise and customers had to manage those work loads. RDS provides a more easily consumed managed database service.
Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk PaaS, which had supported PHP and Java, now adds .NET to the mix.
The news shows just how tightly contested this battle among cloud providers for developers has gotten. Earlier on Tuesday, Tier 3 announced availability of its new CloudFoundry-based PaaS — which also boasts .NET support. At the same time, Microsoft is trying to get .NET and non-.NET developers alike to develop applications for and host them on its Azure PaaS. And VMware is pushing Cloud Foundry as the PaaS that straddles all the major IaaS players.
And as Amazon adds more services to its infrastructure as a service, the line between IaaS and PaaS is getting blurrier.
Pretty soon we’re going to need a scorecard.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
- Forecasting the future cloud computing market
- Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
